The greatest gift you can give a child is an imagination

by Tyler Lau · April 19, 2018

“If you can visualize it, you can remove it.” That’s what the founders of mindTV believe when it comes to the scary, stressful, and sad feelings that kids can experience. And helping kids is their purpose.

Sonya Mosimann and Chris Luescher, founders of mindTV, reside in a Swiss town near Zurich with Sonya’s two kids. Her children were healthy and happy, but things took a turn suddenly when her son started having trouble fitting in at school, and his behavior started to change. Noticing that this was out of the ordinary, Sonya sought out professionals to try and help define the underlying issue with very little success.

Through the need to help her own son, Sonya learned that other parents were facing the same issue. Realizing that existing therapy methods weren’t helping both her son or other kids, she became a children’s therapist herself. Over time, and through thousands of sessions with kids, it became increasingly clear that a child’s imagination was an incredibly powerful tool.

Sonya developed visualization methods to help children use their imagination to turn bad feelings into objects and remove them from their life. She wanted to pass this information on to other people so they could also help kids with negative and troubling feelings. And thus, mindTV was born.

Sonya shares a story on the mindTV website; “It started with a six year old boy. When I was working with him I asked him to tell me about his feelings and he said, ‘What do you mean feelings?’ I said, ‘You know, the bad feelings.’ I even tried to change my voice to explain it to him. Every angle I came at, he said he didn’t know. All of the sudden I had this idea, ‘Okay I’m going to ask him to go see what the feeling looks like,’ and the funny thing was that straight away he knew exactly where it is, exactly what the color is. I thought this was brilliant and maybe now that he knows what it looks like, we can go back and see where it all started.”

Instead of verbally describing the challenges or feelings that the child might be harboring, Sonya coaxed the child to visualize the feeling into an object and trace it back to the original manifestation. Then, by properly identifying the issue and working up the timeline she would ask the child to throw away the object, thus effectively removing the issue and enriching their life. Essentially, creating TV in the child’s mind.

“I work with the imagination of your child to turn his worries into objects – and remove them permanently.”

Over the course of five years, Sonya perfected her method. Recognizing there was a need in their community to help other children, Chris helped Sonya structure the knowledge she wanted to share into a professional training program.

With the intention of educating coaches, therapists, and providing schools with these resources, mindTV needed a solid platform to get their digital business rolling. With Chris’ background in business, and his experience with building hundreds of WordPress-based websites, he knew that a simple, effective platform would help them distribute this knowledge to their target audience. For this reason, they choose Easy Digital Downloads as their digital eCommerce foundation.

Chris recounted his first experience building a website using EDD, and how it changed his perception of web development, and ultimately, his career. “It was the moment I realized I wanted to build my own company instead of working for clients. So, when I kept reading emails from parents, teachers and doctors, thanking Sonya for what she had done for them, I realized, this was our chance. And here we are, years later, with tons of experience and finally, a promising business that actually makes a real difference.”

When explaining why EDD was the right fit for them, he starts, “Since we are planning long-term, it was crucial to us that the software we run comes from a company that also plans to be around for a while.”

“As interested readers of Pippin’s yearly reviews, and having followed him for years, it was an easy decision to go with EDD. In fact, in all our planning, we even made sure that our concept would always be tailored to fit the EDD features.”

Chris continues with his reasoning; “Experience has shown it’s best to go with premium players in the WordPress world. They keep their plugins up to date, ensure best possible compatibility, invest into security and provide support.”

“As a business, we really have this gut feeling, that if at any point, something would really go wrong, EDD would be there to help.”

mindTV primarily offers training courseware for therapists. By utilizing a handful of EDD extensions such as Content Restriction, Recurring Payments, Multilingual, Stripe Payment Gateway, Manual Purchases, and Downloads As Services, they were able to tailor a store to suit their current market, but also structured to handle a wider range of customers as they grow.

Chris opted to use Content Restriction easily control access of training material to all paying customers. When speaking of their pricing model, he explained, “After careful evaluation, we chose to go with a simple one-time fee instead of monthly or yearly subscriptions. Also, we opted not to drip. The client pays once and has unlimited access immediately. So, we run EDD with the Content Restriction add-on.”

Since mindTV’s products are currently geared for professionals, the course materials might be a little pricey for those on a budget. The mindTV website uses Recurring Payments to offer payment plans and currently 20% of clients have opted for this payment option. And for those clients wishing to pay through their banks, Manual Purchases resolves this issue. These curated extensions make a significant difference to the bigger picture when offering payment options to new clients.

“One of the most troubling downsides of being a non-coder and running digital platforms is dependency on developers. With every customization, this dependency grows. With EDD we were able to build everything without a single line of custom code.”

mindTV is still young. Launched in January of 2017, they have established a solid foundation in their home market of Switzerland, and also Germany. When we spoke to Chris recently, over 160 trainees had sign up to their courses. Since launch, they’ve earned over $240,000 USD selling their courses on their website. Excluding salaries, operation costs come to around 20%. And they’ve barely scraped the surface of their potential global audience.

Now, they’re preparing to bring their program to the English-speaking world and other countries where they’ve already established relationships, such as Brazil. The Multilingual extension works wonders by allowing them to run the entire platform in multiple languages and sell to all corners of the world. Their main goal, however, is to create products that will benefit families in the home, and teachers at schools, with big things happening later in 2018.

When asked how they define success, it’s clear in the overwhelmingly positive feedback they receive on what they have created.

“Success is…

When practitioners share their most touching stories.
When parents call to thank us for the changes in their children’s lives.
When children even years later send drawings and postcards of gratitude.
When practitioners call mindTV the best investment they have ever made.

Success is when something we have worked so hard to create, is making a huge difference in the lives of practitioners, parents and kids.”

mindTV’s success is also remarkable. Once, they almost had a refund request, but that customer later booked a session with Sonya and was so happy that she went home and signed up again. Although it is impossible to prevent a refund 100% of the time, this proves that if a course exceeds expectations and delivers the results it promises, only rarely will someone ask for their money back.

Chris told us, “All of this would not have been possible without EDD. So, in some way, all of our success is somewhat connected to yours.” We’re honored that Easy Digital Downloads has helped mindTV springboard their unique vision, and we’re excited to watch their continued growth and accomplishments.

A wise character known as Spongebob Squarepants once said, “Squidward, we don’t need a television. Not as long as we have our imagination.” With mindTV methods, kids can use their imagination to make television in their minds, and learn how to remove bad thoughts and feelings to enjoy a mentally healthy childhood. From a deeply personal need, to a now thriving business, Sonya and Chris are fearlessly driving mindTV into the future.

Written by Tyler Lau

Tyler helps with social media and business development relations. When not in front of a computer he's typically adventuring in the kitchen with friends or off traveling and building something ridiculous.

Easy Digital Downloads Email Newsletter

If you enjoyed that content or found it useful for your business, consider entering your name and email address to join 78,000+ subscribers in receiving Easy Digital Downloads news and updates!

Need help?

We encourage you to contact our support team where you can always get your questions answered. If you'd like to report a bug or have ideas for how to improve the plugin, please post it to our GitHub Issue Tracker.

Trusted Consultants

We maintain a list of consultants that we recommend working with when it comes to managed support, customization, and setup help. For additional help with EDD, consider these trusted consultants.